Re: Beginner to programming. References to understand terms.

[Enrico Colombini <erix@...>]

On 25-Apr-17 14:15, Andrew Starks wrote:
> Have you played with Scratch?https://scratch.mit.edu/

Actually, I co-wrote a couple of Scratch-centered school books for 
primary school :-)

http://deagostiniscuola.deascuola.it/home?layout=search&idmarchio=4&idt=coding&idl=0

They even include a couple of small graphics adventures (my specialty, 
sort of). Here is a mini-orrery without trigonometry:

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/62467626/

> After hating the version of LabView that came with the Lego Mindstorm, I
> was ready to hate on Scratch, as well. 

Eh eh... looks like I was not alone :-)

> The drag and drop interface for it
> works really well. My 8 year old (whom I decided does not need to start
> with C) loves it.  It has the neat ability to let you create and manipulate
> graphics (lines and pens and such). Also, it's event driven, so you can
> create reasonable games. It even has built in collision detection!

Scratch is very easy and captivating to start with, but is not without 
flaws: a broken object model and more than a few residuals from a 1980's 
mindframe. On the other hand it offers a powerful message-passing 
mechanism between independent tasks (I usually explain it as "You shout 
and all the other children listen").

--
  Enrico